I only ever notice it dying on the spawn explosion, yeah. Also, on our first night of serious attempts (yet less than two hours since we did 7/8H in the first 2h and change) we were consistently on the third platform with a handful of attempts on the fourth, our best attempt involved dying during the landed portion of the bolt due to a crush on the ranged stack spot.
I realize it only gets exponentially harder on 4th platform and beyond, but yeah, I like this fight much better than H-Spine.